Towards Using Machine Translation Techniques to Induce Multilingual Lexica of Discourse Markers

Discourse markers are universal linguistic events subject to language variation. Although an extensive literature has already reported language specific traits of these events (e.g. [6,7,4,3,9]), little has been said on their cross-language behavior and, subsequently, on building an inventory of multilingual lexica of discourse markers. Thus, this work describes new methods and approaches for the description, classification, and annotation of discourse markers in the specific domain of the Europarl corpus. The study of discourse markers in the context of translation is crucial due to the idiomatic nature of these structures (e.g. [1,2]). Multilingual lexica together with the functional analysis of such structures are useful tools for the hard task of translating discourse markers into possible equivalents from one language to another.